Looking for NLP technique and drawing a blank
You might be referring to Semantic role labeling. SRL is the task of assigning labels to words or phrases in a sentence that shows their semantic role in that sentence. 

In your example CV was hit by IV, the task is to identify the verb "hit" carried out by the actor "CV" affected "IV" the recipient.

Note: If you're only interested in the syntactic relationship among words or phrases in a sentence, not the semantic relationship between them, simple dependency parsing would do the job.